The adaptation Stephen King hated made by a director he loved: “When genius goes wrong”
Every director is capable of making a bad movie, something Stephen King found out the hard way. The author decided to take the plunge and try his hand at filmmaking by adapting himself and bringing Maximum Overdrive to the screen in 1986, and the results weren’t pretty.
In fact, they were so bad that King has never felt the urge to direct in the four decades since, although the film does at least have a memorable soundtrack thanks to AC/DC. Wisely, the prolific author has decided to leave it up to the professionals, but even the director responsible for one of his favourite features wasn’t immune to the curse of botching one of the countless page-to-screen adaptations.
King is a noted and vocal supporter of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, even if he wasn’t in the minority by celebrating its merits as one of the greatest, most visceral, and most influential horror flicks ever made because that’s entirely true. With that in mind, he would have been beside himself with glee when he discovered it would be none other than Hooper tackling a small screen stab at Salem’s Lot.
Quentin Tarantino might not be a fan of the two-part event that aired in November 1979, but it fully deserves its cult favourite status. Hooper stayed away from King’s stories for the next decade and a half, though, which may have been better off as a permanent sabbatical, looking at what happened when he turned to one of Hollywood’s most coveted bibliographies for inspiration.
A box office bomb and a critical disaster, 1995’s The Mangler didn’t really stand a chance. What’s scary about a laundry press inhabited by the spirit of an evil demon? Not much on the page as King’s 1972 short story displayed, and even less on the screen as Hooper’s tedious terror showed.
It must have been a source of seriously mixed emotions for King, who wrote in Stephen King Goes to the Movies that Hooper was “something of a genius” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre proves that beyond doubt.” However, as it pertained to The Mangler, there was a caveat: “When genius goes wrong, brother, watch out.”
“The film version of The Mangler is energetic and colourful, but it’s also a mess with Robert Englund stalking through it for reasons which remain clear to me even now,” he explained. “The movie’s visuals are surreal, and the sets are eye-popping, but somewhere along the way (maybe in the copious amounts of steam generated by the film’s mechanical star), the story got lost.”
That’s an awfully nice way of saying it’s a terrible movie, which it definitely is. That said, it’s easy to suspect that King’s appreciation and admiration for Hooper’s previous work prevented him from twisting the knife further into The Mangler.
